Robots are just part of an education

Teaching children new tech is a good start. But they must learn what underpins it

Students interact with their classmates via computer as they show off iPads (DELORES JOHNSON/The National)

The robots are coming. That, at least, was the message from the World Economic Forum’s summit in Abu Dhabi this week: that the UAE would soon introduce robot labs in schools to teach science and innovation.

It is a worthy ambition and a plan that could only happen in the UAE. As Bernie Meyerson, the chief innovation officer at IBM, put it at the conference, the UAE is well-placed to lead in this area. But it is worth pondering the difference between having robots in schools and teaching schoolchildren how to build the robots of the future.

The robots have been coming for some time. For years, it has been predicted that robots would, in the not-too-distant future, dominate our daily lives. Early 20th century newspapers promised that housework would soon be a thing of the past – today’s husbands and wives can tell you that hasn’t happened. It is certainly true that much warfare and transport are now carried out, essentially, by robots – but planes still need pilots at the helm and drone operators are required to make all the decisions.

And, indeed, the most interesting parts of modern planes and modern warfare are not necessarily the hardware that flies, but the software that computes and analyses in the background. That’s the essential concern.

This generation of schoolchildren will, of course, have to build the robots of tomorrow. But they will also have to create software to run them and invent things that are literally unimagined today and, for most of us, unimaginable. It is worth noting that those who created Google, Facebook and the other technology that dominate our daily lives did not study those products at school. Rather, they studied the underlying ideas – the mathematics, the coding, the design – that enabled them to later invent these products.

The main thing is to ensure that the education system today is flexible enough to teach children both the basics and also whatever else comes along in the next few years.

That, indeed, was the message from Michael Lambert, the head of Dubai College, writing in these pages last week: “We need to be ready to run schools that resurrect and explicitly teach old philosophies – such as ethics and morality – while also teaching new skills such as coding and entrepreneurship.”

Robots and iPads can take young minds only so far. It is the maths and science that run them that will enable their ideas to take flight.